The Purple Sage Project

The Project involved a partnership with 5 other community agencies – the Brotherhood of St Laurence, The Stegley Foundation, YWCA, Victorian Local Governance Association and The People Together Project.

The project revolved around a community dialogue process which extended across Victoria. It involved approximately 6000 women and men in small groups of up to ten people all around the state in a thoughtful deliberation of the key issues and the actions they could start to think about taking to address these issues.

Women constituted 75% of the hundreds of Group Leaders who played a critical role in facilitating this ground-breaking, grass roots reflective process.

In a special post-election review by the Sunday Age, 24th October 1999, entitled Victoria’s Watershed: Faces of the Revolution, Paul Heinrichs observed that the Purple Sage Project tapped into the inchoate unease that Victorians were experiencing about the Kennett revolution… and that it was to become a massive exercise in participatory democracy.

Please contact us if you would like a CD copy of the public document - The Purple Sage Project: From the Wisdom of the People Action for our Times